At Home with Michael Geller

Join the ICAA for the latest installment of Classicism in Conversation, featuring architect Michael Geller, who works at ICAA Member firm G.P. Schafer Architect. Michael shares the story of his carefully crafted renovation of his own 495 square-foot apartment in Greenwich Village, New York City. See photos of how they transformed this space on classicist.org. 

Transcript

At Home with Mike Geller

Kellen Krause: [00:00:00] You're listening to Classicism in Conversation, a project of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, which is launching a new series of podcasts, examining the relevance of the classical tradition today. We're excited to bring new topics to new audiences and want your feedback write to podcasts at  classicist.org.

With your comments, enjoy the show.

   Mike Geller: [00:00:23] Nothing is ever really stagnant. It's always evolving in a city. 

Welcome to At Home, a vicarious look at today's creatives. These are their stories of what it's like to live as a designer. You can follow along the At Home miniseries with a special photo log on classassist.org

This show is sponsored by Historical Concepts you can find them online at historicalconcepts.com or an instagram at historical concepts

  Mike Geller: [00:00:55] My name is Michael Geller. I'm an architect in New York with Gil Schafer.

I live in Greenwich Village . Before that, my wife and I  lived in Murray Hill in a small 330 square  foot  studio.

  When we were looking for apartments, we idealized in our head an area that would be our preferred neighborhood streets to  find an apartment. And we looked from Broadway to seventh Avenue and from Union square down to Washington square- that swath. 

It's very residential, but was close to many different neighborhoods and destinations in lower Manhattan.

Lower fifth there. It has a very residential vibe, which for us, we were really looking for.  That's what we narrowed in on. And we got lucky that we found a place in that square.  Convenient  for  commuting  and for all the neighborhood spots to go to. 

 I'm very attracted to the hustle and bustle that goes on, which,  is not for everyone.   I understand when people say to me that, Oh, I would never  want to live in New York. I just like visiting New York.  I get it,  but   for the reasons that a lot of people don't like  the busyness, an, always something buzzing. I like that aspect of it. that other people might not.

So that to me is  the biggest draw of New York, and then, I also just love that that's probably the best architecture of any city in the country, classical or modern, but especially the classical buildings. I love that part of it.

And just always being able to walk around Manhattan or Brooklyn and seeing great buildings. It's really inspiring to surround yourself with that.  I feel really privileged to live in a place like that.  The city is really ephemeral and the changes that can happen to a neighborhood, in some ways it can be bad, and it's a really contentious thing these days, but in some ways that  vibrancy and change just shows a living, breathing organism of the neighborhood.

Now its easy for me to say that.  To live in an area of the city and Greenwich village, that's  very beautifully preserved, pre-war, neighborhood. And I wouldn't change anything about. The neighborhood at all.  It's the best example of, that real authentic, New York city neighborhood from the twenties and  before.

 There's a certain mix. When the modern and the classical, buildings come together well, it shows a vibrancy to me and I find that appealing too. 

 The apartment can always evolve too. it's interesting to me thinking about apartments in New York City and my building  from the 1920s. The number of renovations that happen to these units over the years,   every time a new owner takes the place, they're probably going to do some  at least minor renovation just to fix a couple of things the way they wanted to. Nothing is ever really, stagnant. It's always evolving in a city. 

Finding It

 When we moved into our current apartment, we were getting an upgrade in a lot of ways because we added a door and about a hundred square feet to our 500 square foot one bedroom.

  I did a gut reno of the current place. It was in pretty rough shape when we found it, which was something that was appealing to me.

 We had been apartment hunting, my wife and I, for  four months  When we walked into  our current apartment, to me  it looked perfect.   Everything I wanted. It had lots of work to be done in the bathroom and the kitchen. It was in pretty rough shape. The current tenant though had, strewn about trash,   pizza boxes and beer bottles and stuff.  We walked in there and I was immediately looking past all the little trash and junk cause I was like, Oh, this place has great bones and it's awesome. But my wife was like, did you see all the garbage? He was trying to make it seem like a bad apartment,  he wanted to try to buy it too. It was all a tactic. Maybe it made some people reconsider the apartment and we ended up getting it  

 The Renovation

We definitely didn't want to live in the apartment while, the renovation was happening if we could help it. And it worked out timing wise with our studio rental.  We were able to renovate  before we moved in. The contractor said it was going to take three months. It took nine.

 I learned that lesson on my own the hard way.  There's challenges with apartments in New York city  co-ops and boards and all these things that are just  part of the territory.

  I was very excited because I designed the renovation and when construction was going on, I was there every single day checking in with the contractor, seeing the progress that had been made.

I would go on my lunch break from work while the guys were working and just check it out.  I was excited the whole time, but definitely by the end when the month delays kept  piling up, we're just sorta looking at each other being  man, we got to get in. 

  When the renovation was about to happen,  I talked to a couple contractor contacts in the city that I knew that were doing much higher and larger apartment work than what I had to offer.

 I really didn't expect to be able to leverage any of those contacts into a contractor directly. But the contact I ended up getting was the guy who cuts my hair, had this contractor that  had just finished work on his salon.  He said, this guy, Russ is great. I'll give you his number.

And I talked to him and things  worked out.  it ended up being a good contact to find him .  It opened my eyes to the different, levels of, contracting in the New York City world.  At work we really operate with, some of the higher end, larger contractors in the city.  You have to  calibrate how you give instruction and what the expectation is for how the work gets done, if it's in a nonlinear way because it's just a different process. But everyone is super earnest and, it worked out really well. This contractor, Russ Cherkasov was really willing to make things the way I could envision them.  And that was really helpful to have someone that was willing to  play ball and  fix mistakes that happened.  Every day I see  a new thing that I missed or  I forgot to consider when I was designing it. That's its whole idea in itself, living in a place you've designed.

 Things were mostly smooth. But the one thing that didn't work out so well, and it's a lesson that I learned about,  antique door hardware. One of the first things that I found for the design of the new apartment was these 10 or 12 beautiful antique doorknobs from Olde Good Things.

  It's a great store and the knobs are great. They really set the tone perfectly for the apartment with 1850s Greek revival doorknobs from somewhere in New Jersey, I think. What I found is Russ really wasn't able to find the way to attach those door knobs onto the doors. By the time we moved in, there was no door knobs at all on any of the doors, and we had tape temporarily allowing us to open and close some doors here and there. And it was, a while before we got them installed. Once we did it, it was great. And, things were a little bit easier to operate.

Architecture

 The general layout of the apartment is a  classic one bedroom, where you walk in to a vestibule with a small kitchen immediately on your left.

Then you progress through a living room, a hallway with a bath, and then the bedroom at the end of the apartment. The layout was amazing 

 The thing is, a lot of times the layout is right there.  It's  what the space wants to be.  There's always maybe a best layout and with the small  apartment, only so many ways to try it out, right? 

 The one thing I changed was a really narrow pinched entry to the kitchen off of the vestibule that I really wanted to close up and then open up the wall between the kitchen and the living room to have a more modern connection  between your living space and your kitchen, which is pretty typical these days.  Otherwise one of the aspects of the apartment that really attracted me right off the bat was a small picture rail that wrapped the upper parts of the walls of the main rooms. This  Greek  picture rail a  remaining original detail

and it really  set the tone for this Grecian twenties aesthetic with the decor and the architecture. The apartment is  495 square feet.  The kitchen itself is pretty small and, it's narrow and long-ish. When I created the cabinetry layout in the kitchen, it was a pretty straightforward task because there was really just only one layout that maximized the square footage, an L shaped kitchen with the sink at the far end.  The primary room of the apartment is the living room.  There's a cased opening that was opened to the living room from the kitchen.  That cased opening along with all the other doors and cased openings in the apartment received a door casing surround that had a classical profile to it . That was something that I was really keen on getting.

Even though it's a really small casing, it's  two and a half inches, I really wanted to get the sculptural effect of a back backbend on the casing.   That  begins to push the architecture in a definitively classical way.

But I definitely wanted to contrast that classical architecture with a more modern treatment of the decorating. In the living room, for example, there's the classical architectural trim, wrapping the crown with the picture rail and the casings along with the baseboard that had a classical profile.

But then the furnishings, there's a modern, 1970s era glass coffee table with brass supports below and then   a modern ,    Klismos Robsjohn Gibbings chair. And a Saarinen tulip table and Breuer chairs. All of that is offsetting a classical architecture on the walls.

There's a nice harmony that you can find between classical and modern furniture pieces where even though something might be more streamlined there's still a precision to the design that  is representative of the quality level of a modern or a traditional piece. That's something that I always  looked for is that if it really had that sense of design to it, whether modern or classical,  it can always  pair with each other.

 The kitchen is tiny. It's eight feet by four feet, but you really just have enough room for yourself to  walk and  shuffle side to side a little bit.

  I have everything that I need right there, but it's very tight. 

  I totally flip flopped the arrangement of the kitchen.

I had the wall between the living room and the kitchen free. I can try to open up a cased opening.  it was definitely a wholesalee rerouting of piping and ripping out everything that was extant in there. 

I was hoping to be able to really open up the wall between the kitchen and living room. Maybe get  a five foot wide opening or just something that made it feel like  two spaces or one. but there was existing and dead piping in the walls that were running between floors, but we weren't able to chop through them.  There's some fire danger. I'm not sure what it was. They had to be preserved as it was. we were only able to have a cased opening that was  two and a half feet wide. that was what we were examining. for how big of an opening we could get between the two rooms.

my wife tests does a lot of the cooking. She's a great cook and she loves cooking in there, we wanted to have this space be functional, even though it was going to be small.  You can't move around ton in there, but it's definitely a spot that two people can work in side-by-side.   One person's at the stove and one person's chopping off to left.   It's totally a maximized kitchen layout that gets the most out of,  the small apartment kitchens that are all over the place out here.  Having the opening totally allows the flow to be  physically connected between the living room and the kitchen, which is great.

But starting with cooking when there's two people in there. Having that space open right behind you allows the kitchen to feel larger than it is. Whereas if we didn't move the opening to that wall, it would've just felt like a three-sided space completely.  It's  a little bit of a relief

for the space in the kitchen. Being able to connect with guests that would be in the living room right outside the kitchen, it's nice to just  be able to look right over your shoulder and  be a part of the conversation.

Whereas just even though  the opening only moved about three feet and, to a different wall, it makes drastic change in how connected you feel to the rest of what's going on.  if you're looking at a space always think about what if the layout changed slightly and what benefits might there from that?

Cause you never know. 

Living Room

  the layout of our living room here was pretty straightforward because of the size of the place and the way the windows were centered on one wall, about another. That central axis, combined with the size of the apartment really  forced our hand for where the TV would be on the wall above the console and opposite the windows.

 it's a great spot for the TV. And  everyone watches TV these days, it's something you have to contend with. we didn't have many options for potentially hiding the TV and still keeping the layout that we wanted for our furniture. we didn't let the TV placement dictate our furniture.

in some ways we just made the best, we could with where the TV went. when all these, apartments and houses get photographed for these magazines,  the TV is one inch outside the frame.  it's always right there.  there's only so much you can do sometimes and you have to make sure it's a comfortable way to liveBathroom

 the bathroom, is in a really nice spot in the apartment between the bedroom and the living room, which was something that I was really, Keen to not sacrifice layout wise because it's just nice for guests to not have to traipse through your bedroom.

if you can help it.   that was something I was always looking for in the apartments  this bathroom is a complete, gut renovation. Everything in there was, really shoddy, and I was hoping that there would be some salvageable pieces, but once we  got into it, the fittings were nice and old, but they were just  not salvageable.

 we went with all new fixtures and. Fittings,   the one thing that I was keen to do architecturally was that I treated all the walls with, a white subway tile. And, I really wanted to have a fully tiled wall experience in the bathroom  it just.

Feels a lot like a bathroom to have that  treatment. and with the floors, I wanted to change the scale for the tile. of the, small, penny round tiles,  definitely a neutral white clean palette.

 we used, Cesar stone, at the kitchen, but for the jams of the window in shower and tub.

I lined it with ' Caesarstone and this was actually something that. Is honestly a source of pride for how the design turned out. And it's such a small, insignificant detail, all of the courses have tiles for the entire bathroom. coordinate neatly with their neighbors.

The bottom of the window sill is lining up with the tile joint and I was able to work through, all of these specific details with the workers on site. The first time that it happened, it was, close to being the,  alignments that I was hoping for.

but I was able to draw on the wall and show them, point to physically the spots that needed to line up. it was really helpful to be able to physically draw right there in front of them. Cause that was an easier way to convey the message, They were totally down to do the details, which is really nice and helpful.

it was nice to see with the. Person doing the work. When they finally clicked in their head about what the design was, and you see them go, Oh, okay, great.  I know exactly how to do this now. Just go take it from there, and then next time you come back, it was done perfectly.

 the goal was to. make this bathroom seem like it  was always there.   this is the bathroom that this apartment building could have had.  this really would have fit right in. I decided that I wanted to treat the apartment, in a way that  could have been real when it was built in the 1920s.

the bones of the apartment are  set up already to promote that look.  it just  plays into what the apartment wanted to be in a certain way. especially in the, the extent that I found that the apartment,  maybe had way less of its existing detailing, that was still there.

Maybe,  you don't feel, that about really changing layouts and, organizing, trying to not make the space feel like it was old. But  that ours was set up nicely to do it, glad we did. 

 DecorI had a definite vision for what I was hoping to make, my wife really had input with the bedroom,   she in the bedroom really wanted to be  soft and  feminine.   we were able to work together and find nice pieces that  fit what she wanted.

I was architect for myself out in the other areas and then I was architect for her in the bedroom and trying to make that how she wanted it.  it was a fun,  experience to do both at the same time. you always gotta make sure,  your wife is happy with how things are going.

it was definitely  back and forth process. in the bedroom, she wanted things to feel soft and, uncomfortable. that idea, the extended through the bedding and even to the curtains that have , a sag in the middle, and there's, some definite texture to them in a nice shade of purple.  this is a room that, the decorating really conveyed a different image than what was out in the living room, which is one of more femininity and comfort.

we have a really small strip of space on both walls, but we put a gallery, wall of different eclectic pieces of art that we found at thrift shops or,  wherever. it was a nice, way to fill up these small strips of space.

above our bed we have a collage that was made by an artist we found in the Paris flea markets, he made these really amazing collages of  1920s archaeological imagery with this  psychedelic, modern background.

 my wife and I really fell in love with them when we saw them and it complimented our apartments vibe really well. there's some of our favorite pieces. each of us had a few, small paintings, that we brought from,  Previous lives. we already had a little bit of, some small stuff to, put on the walls. One that was more thought through from the beginning when I was designing everything is this large.

1970s super graphic, silkscreen print. I  stumbled upon it on this website, cherish, they sell a lot of vintage pieces,  I was completely trawling the entirety of this site multiple times a day looking through tons of things, just flipping and flipping and flipping.

eventually I stumbled upon this, jumbo so extreme print and I really wanted something big and to have one spot where  the art was not just small paintings or small photos,  but just something larger and more commanding. this large blue and white super graphic of  a streamlined, intertwined, not, is what we found it fit perfectly  I wanted it to be above the bar cart in the living room.

there's a console table, underneath our TV,  on center in the living room. I've designed some furniture in the past and I wanted to try my hand at, designing a console table to fit in this specific spot, in the living room.

I was going to try to continue the theme that I was, thinking of the apartment in, which was  the classical 1920s deco. modernity and streamlined forms with the Greek classical, shapes.  I came up with a consult table with legs of a horse stylized to be very modern and flat.

like you might find in the Villa carry loaves, which was the reference point for the furniture here.

How To

 I tried to think of vignettes on the walls and with pieces of furniture, constantly trying to, think more like a decorator or think looser and  push away from some of the architect. 

it's something that  anyone could absolutely do.

 Whenever you're flipping through a glossy magazine and you're,  admiring, what you're seeing, decorating or architectural wise, think about, what that room, would look like outside the frame. And think about how, the pieces that you see there and how they come together.

 for me I learned a lot when I was looking through the glossy magazines and studying how, those images were composed and the layers of the decorating one on top of each other.

  anyone can do that though, just by  taking your glossy magazines and just  analyzing them a little bit. 

those are things that everyone has in their apartment and it's just about how you consider things and arrange them.  the art and the decor was something that, tried to focus on in conjunction with the architecture when I was designing it all from scratch, which was definitely a luxury to have, during the design. 

 the console table that I designed and had built,  to.

my exact specifications was really cool thing, and that's something I'm going to have forever. I fell in love with that, silkscreen. And it's something that I can have anywhere in a prominent spot and it's just a really cool piece.

  definitely really fond of those two,  over anything else. 

,   that's been,  a really special thing to have that apartment that's all your own with you and your spouse.  it's been a real blessing, in that regard   we were able to shape the place to be what we wanted it to be.  

couple more hundred square feet,  that would be the kicker.

Cause everything else we did it just the way he wanted it, the whole apartment.  we're really happy with how it turned out.   making the most out of our 495 square feet. 

 Kellen Krause: [00:21:44] Many thanks to our sponsor historical concepts find them online@historicalconcepts.com or an instagram at historical concepts

 At home is a production of the Institute of classical architecture and art, a national nonprofit, promoting the practice, understanding and appreciation of classical design. To become a member and learn about additional programming visit class assist.org.  This episode was produced by Justin Kegley and Kellen Krause and edited by Kellen Krause, Molly Wohlforth and Justin Kegley.